In commemoration of the centennial of 3-D motion pictures, we present 3-D RARITIES. It has taken over 30 years for the 3-D Film Archive to assemble and restore the material in this eye-popping collection of ultra-rare and long-lost movies. Presented in high-quality digital 3-D, all films have been stunningly restored and mastered direct from archival materials. Meticulously aligned shot by shot for precise registration of the original left/right elements, these historic 3-D motion pictures have never before looked this good.

Antología de cuatro horas de obras de los animadores John y Faith Hubley.

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Beginning in the mid-'50s, the husband-and-wife team of John and Faith Hubley broke new ground in animation with their explorations of complex ideas, cutting-edge graphics, and jazz soundtracks. When jazz was still largely marginalized as an art form in America, the Hubleys worked with Quincy Jones, Dizzy Gillespie, Benny Carter, Ella Fitzgerald, Oscar Peterson, and Lionel Hampton. For visual inspiration, they looked to the paintings of Picasso, Matisse, Miro, Klee, and Modigliani. Their short films are very different from Hollywood cartoons. The translucent, semi-abstract figures who embrace in The Tender Game suggest the emotions of two young lovers, rather than their physical motions. In Adventures of an *, a child and his father shift between stylized humans forms and patterns of lines as they explore their evolving relationship. The Academy Award-winning The Hole, a debate between two construction workers on the folly of the nuclear arms race, features improvised dialogue by Dizzie Gillespie and George Mathews. Faith Hubley's The Cosmic Eye is a feature-length compilation of earlier material, linked with new animation. The Hubley films are adult in the best sense of the word: not sexually explicit or gruesomely violent, but thoughtful, imaginative reflections on serious themes.

Capturing Keaton’s first steps in front of a camera this box set charts his early association with ex-Keystone Kop Roscoe ‘Fatty’ Arbuckle through to starring in, headlining, and directing his own box office smash hits. Using Chaplin’s old Hollywood studios in 1920, Keaton’s sophisticated technical inventiveness coupled with his haunted-yet-handsome ‘Stone Face’ persona, created a succession of the most timeless, classic comedy shorts ever realised. The Masters of Cinema Series is proud to present the following films in a luxurious box set, available on DVD, as well as on Blu-ray for the first time in the UK.

Disc 2:Audio commentaries by Joseph McBride on The ‘High Sign’, One Week, Convict 13That's Some Buster, a new exclusive video essay by critic and filmmaker David Cairns Life with Buster Keaton (1951, excerpt) - Keaton re-enacts Roscoe Arbuckle's "Salomé dance", first performed in The Cook

Disc 3:Audio commentaries by Joseph McBride on The Playhouse and The Boat

Disc 4:Newly discovered version of The Blacksmith containing four minutes of previously unseen footage Audio commentary by Joseph McBride on CopsAlternate ending for My Wife’s Relations The Art of Buster Keaton, actor Pierre Étaix discusses Keaton’s style Audio recording of Keaton at a party in 1962

Working outside the mainstream, the wildly prolific, visionary Stan Brakhage made more than 350 films over a half century. Challenging all taboos in his exploration of “birth, sex, death, and the search for God,” he turned his camera on explicit lovemaking, childbirth, even autopsy. Many of his most famous works pursue the nature of vision itself and transcend the act of filming. Some, including the legendary Mothlight, were created without using a camera at all, as he pioneered the art of making images directly on film, by drawing, painting, and scratching. With these two volumes, we present the definitive Brakhage collection—fifty-six of his works, from across his career, in high-definition digital transfers.

VOLUMEONE (ONEDISC)

High-definition digital transfers of all twenty-six films, with uncompressed audio for those with sound:

My Girlfriend's Wedding (1080p, 63 min.): In 1969, McBride followed up Diary with a film that, in many ways, is its opposite. Where Diary is a faux-documentary that seems real, My Girlfriend's Wedding is a genuinely real account that's almost too hard to believe. Most of the film consists of long interviews with McBride's English girlfriend, Clarissa Ainley, who describes her troubled past, her thoughts on the counterculture "revolution," and her ploy to marry another man in order to stay in America. (I was confused at first as to why she couldn't simply marry McBride, but after some internet sleuthing, I discovered he was still married to, but separated from, his wife at the time.)

Pictures from Life's Other Side (1080p, 45 min.): A loose sequel to Wedding, 1971's Pictures charts McBride and a pregnant Ainley's cross-country journey to Los Angeles, where they hope to make a new home. It's a road movie with frank sexuality, interesting family dynamics, and plenty of Americana scenery.

My Son's Wedding to My Sister-in-law (1080i, 9 min.): In 2008, McBride made this short film about the complicated web that is his extended family.

Synopsis: Abel, a child-like man of 30, dreams of being able to transform the course of events while living in his own little world with a motley collection of insects, comic book cut-outs, miniature planes in birdcages and books in the fridge. However, it is the course of events in a single day that will transform Abel. While he waits in vain for his girlfriend, Madeleine, he meets by chance a former love, Mary, who is leaving Quebec for Europe that same night. When he visits his gravely ill mother in hospital, he receives news, after 10 years of silence, from his father Napoleon, who has made a new life in Brazil... Abel will soon have to deal with his feelings of abandonment and despair behind his light-hearted absurdist humor and his melancholic eccentricity.

An existential and softly poetic movie, yet very simple and accurate about the characters’ minds and feelings, with a script who subtly mirrors them on the theme of leaving one another. A sort of synthesis between a certain North American realistic approach and Europe’s New Wave of that time, with an overall singular touch that includes unexpected breaches of slapstick and slow tempo moments of deadpan wittiness. An unfairly unknown and forgotten little jewel of the sixties, who dealt with great dexterity with his low budget. The great documentary director Pierre Perrault wrote: “Lefebvre’s movie reveals an extraordinary mastery of the visual material and of the invisible substance. He then persists to denounce the secret, without any means other than the intelligence of the viewer.”

This is the first Canadian feature fiction to ever be screened at Cannes by a pioneer of Quebec cinema, Jean Pierre Lefebvre, who was the biggest influence of the early Atom Egoyan and the Canadian filmmaker who got the most movies selected at Cannes (where he won the International Critics’ Prize in 1982 for Wild Flowers).

The film was in the Top Ten of Les Cahiers du Cinéma for the year 1968, like many Lefebvre’s movies of that era, and was awarded with the Best Foreign Film at the Hyères Film Festival in France.

Screened last spring for a special retrospective tribute by the Winnipeg Film Group.

“Eraserhead” Stories, a 2001 documentary by Lynch on the making of the film

New 2K digital restorations of six short films by Lynch: Six Men Getting Sick (1967), The Alphabet (1968), The Grandmother (1970), The Amputee, Version 1 and Version 2 (1974), and Premonitions Following an Evil Deed (1995), all with video introductions by Lynch

Four of the films in this collection arrived after the release of the much larger anthology Masterworks of the American Avant-garde Experimental Film, 1920-1970 had gone to press; they are such beautiful and extraordinary works that deserve to be seen after decades of unavailability. All are brilliant and true color copies mastered in high definition from original Kodachrome master copies or camera films.

THE FILMS:

Abstract in Concrete (1952) - 10 min. (no IMDb link)John Arvonio shot footage for this stunning pattern film of New York City at night over a five-year period. The music by Frank Fields is a movement of his 1931 suite Times Square Silhouette. Although it was quite successful and widely shown in the 1950s, Arvonio never released another film.

Analogies #1 and Color Dance #1 (1952-53) - 19 min. (no IMDb link)Analogies #1 and Color Dance #1 are both by Jim Davis (1952-53). Painter, sculptor and a major figure in ‘50’s avant-garde film, Davis is represented in the Masterworks anthology by Evolution. “Abstract and mysterious to many spectators, these waves and studies of light were for Davis images if the causative forces of nature.” – ReVoir

Treadle and Bobbin (1954) - 8 min.The Singer treadle sewing machine stars in this rhythmic and imaginatively photographed work. “A distinguished visual analysis of moving parts, well exploited for beauty and interest and notable for its fresh observation.” – Melbourne (Australia) Int’l Film Festival. Galentine collaborated with other major independent filmmakers of the period including Francis Thompson, Shirley Clarke and Alexander Hammid, but this is his only released solo work.

N.Y., N.Y. (1957) - 15 min.Thompson shot the vibrant fractured images with a Kodak Ciné-Special camera specially rigged with “secret” mirrors, kaleidoscopes and even reflective car hubcaps. The experience remains an exquisite time capsule that not only documents Manhattan during the 1950s but also, in the words of the New York Times, proffers “one of the few genuine mas¬terpieces” of the burgeoning experimental film movement in the United States.

First published in 1977 at the height of the punk era, UK Sci-Fi comic 2000AD was violent, anti-authoritarian, darkly funny and distinctly British. With such iconic characters as Strontium Dog, Nemesis and Judge Dredd, it became the anarchic underdog that forever changed the face of the international comics industry. Offering a comprehensive overview of the comic’s history, Future Shock! takes a funny, moving and passionate look at the various highs and lows of how a band of talented eccentrics came together to create a visionary and extraordinary publication that still remains a game-changer more than 40 years later. Featuring interviews with the likes of Pat Mills (ABC Warriors, Slaine), Dave Gibbons (Watchmen), Neil Gaiman (The Sandman), Karl Urban (Dredd) and Alex Garland (Ex Machina), Future Shock! is the definitive story of the most successful comic in the galaxy - now loaded with over six hours of previously unseen extras.

Introduction to the film by director Jean Renoir• Audio commentary written by film scholar Alexander Sesonske and read by filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich• Comparison of the film’s two endings• Selected-scene analysis by Renoir historian Chris Faulkner• Excerpts from Jean Renoir, le patron: La Règle et l’exception (1966), a French television program by filmmaker Jacques Rivette• Part one of Jean Renoir, a two-part 1993 BBC documentary by film critic David Thompson• Video essay about the film’s production, release, and 1959 reconstruction• Interview with film critic Olivier Curchod• Interview from a 1965 episode of the French television series Les écrans de la ville in which Jean Gaborit and Jacques Durand discuss their reconstruction and rerelease of the film• Interviews with set designer Max Douy, Renoir’s son, Alain; and actress Mila Parély

For Buster Keaton, the era of the talkies was a tumultuous time. As a result of signing with MGM, the quality, the quality of his ambitious, eclectic comedies began to decline and in 1934, he signed a contract with Earle W. Hammons Educational Pictures which, despite its name, specialized in comedy short subjects. Keatons move to Educational was a return to his roots, crafting a stream of two reel comedies in rapid succession, as he had done in the early 1920s, when he first refined his cinematic craft.

The films Buster Keaton made with Educational Pictures (ALL sixteen of which are collected here) pay homage to his earlier work, but at the same time incorporated the element of sound, all while exploring new possibilities for his recurring comic persona, Elmer.

This FIVE HOUR+ collection features all 16 Educational Pictures shorts (14 of which have never been available on DVD until now) including: The Gold Ghost, Allez Oop, Palooka From Paducah, One Run Elmer, Hayseed Romance, Tars and Stripes, The E-Flat Man, The Timid Young Man, Three on a Limb, Grand Slam Opera, Blue Blazes, The Chemist, Mixed Magic, Jail Bait, Ditto and Love Nest on Wheels.

Director James Hill's self-contained drama Lunch Hour (1962), stars Shirley Anne Field and Robert Stephens as a couple beginning an affair. Shirley Anne Field (Beat Girl, Peeping Tom, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, The Entertainer) gives a highly memorable, fierce performance as a young artist/designer on the brink of an affair with an amiable yet weak-willed married male executive (Robert Stephens) at the company where she works. The short (the picture is only 63 minutes long), black and white film, based on the play by John Mortimer, surprisingly supports the aspirations for autonomy - freedom from an unsuitable male companion, domestic drudgery and other people's visions of how she should live/behave - harboured by Shirley Anne Field's nameless Girl. It was perhaps John Mortimer's guilt over his turbulent relationship with his first wife, author Penelope, a marriage shattered by his numerous adulteries and her writer's block, that shaped such a 'feminist' work, With a tightly focused narrative telling the story of an illicit lunch-hour assignation in 'real-time', this is an elegant and highly charged story of deception, seething anxiety and sexual discord. On just the evidence of Lunch Hour alone, the wonderful Shirley Anne Field should have definitely enjoyed an even more successful career than the one she actually attained. The great British poet Philip Larkin famously wrote, "sexual intercourse began in 1963…. Between the end of the Chatterley ban and The Beatles first LP", but in Hill's 1962 film, sharply influenced by the French New Wave, we see the early stirring of female discontent and rebellion that shaped the course of the 'sexual revolution' during that decade and beyond.

Also included on the disc are director James Hill's charming colour British Petroleum shorts, which were first shown in cinemas, then with the advent of colour television in the UK in the late 1960s, enjoyed a second life as trade test colour films on TV. These BP pictures include Skyhook, about a helicopter and its crew working in the harsh jungle of Papua New Guinea searching for oil and the 1959 Oscar-winning short Giuseppina, about a young Italian girl who observes various characters who pass her father's petrol station. Giuseppina was the last trade test colour film to be broadcast in August 1973. Much-loved by viewers, these vibrant, likeable films from a bygone age have found appreciation amongst aficionados of so-called 'Trade Test Transmissions', and have never been previously released in any format.

Meditation on Violence(1948) by Maya Deren35mm enlarged from 16mm with 2K digital insert from 16mm 1.37:1 black & white sound, 12:27 minutes; music a mix of Chinese classical flute and drums recorded in Haiti by Maya Deren

In the early years of cinema, Shakespeare provided cultural respectability and familiar characters and stories for the fledgling medium. Over 300 Shakespeare films from all over the world were produced during the silent era, most of which are now lost. This new compilation of material from the BFI's National Film and Television Archive showcases 26 extracts of some of the very best material that survives, from a fragment of the 1899 British version of King John through a beautifully hand-stencilled Italian version of The Merchant of Venice from 1910, a splendid 1909 US film of A Midsummer Night's Dream, and an early Romeo and Juliet that may include the first onscreen appearance of the legendary actor John Gielgud. Presented with a specially commissioned new score by musicians from the Shakespeare's Globe theatre in London.

Robert Frost. This lovely color film from 1961 was shot over the course of a year, mostly in the region of Robert Frost’s solitary mountain cabin in Vermont. Probably the most celebrated American poet of the twentieth Century, Frost in his mid eighties is seen in three seasons walking the landscape while he is heard reading from about twenty-five of his poems inspired by what is shown. We hear all or part of “October,” “The Sound of Trees,” “Unharvested,” “Birches,” “The Road Not Taken,” “Gathering Leaves,” “Flower-Gathering,” “Good-Bye and Keep Cold,” “The Onset,” “Two Tramps in Mud Time,” “Mending Wall,” and “The Pasture,” among others. In one sequence Mr. Frost is seen in a college seminar answering questions from students. The nature photography of New England is outstanding, as is the quality of this print, mastered in high definition from the original negative.

A Publisher is Known by the Company He Keeps. Alfred A. Knopf and his wife Blanche founded the publishing house bearing his name in 1915. He claimed that he never published an unworthy book, and the Knopf catalog includes 17 winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature and 47 Pulitzer Prize winners. Knopf (1892-1984) maintained a close personal friendship with many of his authors, and in 1926 he bought a Bell & Howell 16mm camera and began to film them. These home movies form the heart of A Publisher is Known by the Company He Keeps, along with scenes of Knopf in 1960 at his home in Purchase, New York. With a warm and personal narration spoken by Mr. Knopf, we see footage and hear his comments about Knopf authors including Thomas Mann, Willa Cather, H. L. Mencken, Max Beerbohm, Sigrid Undset, Walter de la Mare, Rebecca West, Kahlil Gibraan, Eleanor Wylie, Emma Goldman and other literary notables of Knopf’s generation. This edition is digitally mastered from the original negative. (As it enters its second century, the Knopf imprint, together with Random House, Doubleday and Penguin, is owned by Bertelsmann A.G. and Pearson Publishing Group, U.K.)

Sinopsis: Long considered lost until a complete dupe negative was identified in the vaults of La Cinémathèque française last year, this William Gillette film is a vital missing link in the history of Sherlock Holmes on screen. By the time it was produced at Essanay Studios in 1916, Gillette had been established as the world’s foremost interpreter of Holmes on stage—having played him approximately 1300 times since his 1899 debut. This newly-restored edition, thanks to the monumental efforts of both the San Francisco Silent Film Festival and La Cinémathèque française, represents the sole surviving appearance of Gillette’s Holmes on film.

Extras:

From Lost to Found: Restoring William Gillette's Sherlock Holmes, presented by film restorer Robert Byrne at the 2015 San Francisco Silent Film Festival (2015, 24 min.)

Sherlock Holmes Baffled: courtesy of the Library of Congress and presented in HD, this is the earliest known film to feature the character of Sherlock Holmes (1900, 1 min.)

A Canine Sherlock: from the EYE Film Institute, the film stars Spot the Dog as the titular character (1912, 15 min.)

Più forte che Sherlock Holmes: also from the EYE Film Institute, this entertaining Italian trick-film owes as much to Méliès as it does to Doyle (1913, 7 min.)

Late Conan Doyle Talks to You About the Beyond: interview with Arthur Conan Doyle from the Fox Movietone Collection (1928, 12 min.)

Sherlock Holmes Turns Engineer: outtakes from a 1930 newsreel with William Gillette showing off his amateur railroad (1930, 6 min.)

“A movie you may never have heard of but, after seeing it, one you will never forget.” - The Bioscope The Ghost That Never Returns is an outstanding Soviet film by Abram Room, the director of Bed and Sofa (also available via Flicker Alley MOD). Released to little notice in 1930, it joins other very late silents to show the screen still developing high eloquence after the first talkies stopped silent cinema dead in its tracks.

The story takes place at a South American oilfield where José Real (Boris Ferdinandov) is imprisoned for life after attempting to unionize the workers. After ten years, a prisoner is allowed one day’s liberty to visit his family – a privilege from which no one has ever returned alive, for he is accompanied by a detective instructed to assassinate him. The climax of the film, as José’s parole officer waits in a bar for the clock to strike 7, is no less thrilling than (though, of course, predates) the formalist suspense of classic westerns like High Noon.

The most stunning element of The Ghost That Never Returns, though, is the way in which Abram Room, along with his cinematographer Dimitri Feldman, utilizes the camera to express the emotions of the characters. Herman G. Weinberg wrote in 1955: “Although ‘The Ghost’ is replete with cinematic pyrotechnics, these virtuoso effects are not what give the film its strength and validity. Rather is it the psychological revelation achieved by the most subtle use of "long takes" in which the director forces the viewer to think with him until he is convinced he has ‘saturated’ the spectator with character’s thought processes.” Once outside the prison’s walls, for example, José’s experience of every detail - a weed growing from a wall, trash in the wind – is given the utmost attention. When José’s wife learns of his temporary release, she hurtles through the streets telling everyone she sees – the frenetic camerawork vividly communicating her excitement.

This is the original silent version with new English titles and a new musical setting by Rodney Sauer (the film was re-released in 1933 in a shortened version with dubbed dialogue and music). Our only available source was a mint 16mm print made for circulation to workers clubs in the early 1930s. Unfortunately, the image quality is well below our usual standard, but we believe that the high quality of the production is worth the compromise.

Extras:

One of the first experimental Soviet sound films, Pacific 231 (1931, 7 min.), that presents images by Mikhail Tsekhanovsky (book illustrator and film animator) based on Arthur Honegger’s music étude which was a spinoff from his score for La Roue.

Since the late 1970s, identical twins Stephen and Timothy Quay have been creating their unique blend of puppetry and stop-motion animation, and have, in the process, spawned an enormous cult following. The Quays display a passion for detail, a breathtaking command of color and texture, and an uncanny use of focus and camera movement that make their films unique and instantly recognizable. Best known for their classic 1986 film Street of Crocodiles which filmmaker Terry Gilliam selected as one of the ten best animated films of all time they are masters of miniaturization and on their tiny sets have created an unforgettable world, suggestive of a landscape of long-repressed childhood dreams.

This new Blu-ray collection of fifteen of the Quays films allows us to see their work in all its astonishing detail and ravaged beauty. The collection also includes a remarkable new short film by Christopher Nolan, a long-time fan of the Quays, as well as audio commentaries on six of the films and a 30-page booklet with an introduction by Nolan, an updated essay by film critic Michael Atkinson and an extensive Quay Brothers Dictionary.

All films are presented in the highest possible quality from film-to-digital transfers made under the personal supervision of the Quay Brothers.

More from Mondo Vision [11min] [collection of 4 trailers from Andrzej Zulawski films]

Unauthorized Alternate Audio. This audio track features alternative music. It is not the director's approved version, and is included for completeness. Most notable is the addition of the piano theme during the subway miscarriage scene, and the removal of music during a pivotal scene. A handful of releases, including POSSESSION’s first U.S. DVD release (ironically billed as the “Director’s Cut”) were issued only with this audio track. This additional music although composed by Andrzej Korzyñski was never used by the director in the final cut of the film. It is strongly recommended to watch the film with the original director's approved audio.

Extended Interview - Jim Jarmusch (18:31): Featured sporadically throughout Don't Expect Too Much, wild-haired indie filmmaker Jim Jarmusch—who wasn't at Harpur, but served as Ray's assistant at NYU—gets to speak at length here about his time with Ray, who offered him some strategic guidance during the making of his first film.

Extended Interview - Bernard Eisenschitz (19:21): Biographer Bernard Eisenschitz discusses Ray's place in Hollywood, the arc of his career, and how We Can't Go Home Again fits the continuity of his oeuvre.

Camera Three - Profile of Nicholas Ray (28:51): A half-hour 1977 CBS interview with Ray, who fields questions about his career.

Marco Rushes (28:36): Footage from a separate instructional film project—featuring a criminal interviewed by two cops—that Ray undertook with his students at The Lee Strasberg Institute.

About Marco (9:39): Claudio Mazzatenta, the star of Marco, and Gerry Bamman—director, actor, and one of Ray's teaching associates—discuss working with the iconic filmmaker.

The Janitor (12:11): Ray directed—and is featured in—this episode of Wet Dreams, an omnibus film produced by Max Fischer in 1974. Ray plays the titular janitor as well as some sort of—I dunno—cult leader? At an orgy. Or, something. Honestly, I'm not sure what's going on here, except that Ray's character gets fellated by a series of women.